Of Magic and Muggles
by hollyhobbit101
Summary: After witnessing several unexplainable occurrences, the neighbours had all agreed it. There was something just not quite right about little Hermione Granger.


**For the Houses Competition.**

**House: Ravenclaw**

**Subject: Charms**

**Category: Drabble**

**Prompt: There was something odd about the young girl/boy who lived in the last house on the street.**

**Word count: 688**

* * *

There was something odd about the young girl who lived in the last house on the street. She seemed a kind enough child - always said hello to her neighbours, played nicely with the other children; she was, truth be told, the very model of a perfect daughter. Her family, too, were known to be decent people who were always willing to lend a helping hand. And yet… Well, far be it from them to gossip, but everyone else on the street swore up and down they'd seen strange things happening wherever that little girl was. Old Man Shaw claimed it was the work of a witch, but no one paid him any mind.

In any case, it was agreed. Something was just not right with Hermione Granger.

She was, by all accounts, a relatively normal child up to the age of five. Quiet and shy, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary. That it, at least, nothing that was quite so obvious.

At three, Hermione had wandered around their garden, stroking the leaves of plants which, despite Madelaine Granger's best efforts, were slowly but surely turning brown and dead. The next morning, the family awoke to an explosion of colour outside, all of the flowers having miraculously bloomed overnight.

"Almost like magic," Hermione's father had murmured as they surveyed the scene. But they all knew that magic didn't exist, so they chalked it up to that new fertiliser finally working, and that was that.

The next couple of years passed quietly, with the occasional odd occurrence, but nothing that couldn't be explained away. It was only after Hermione began school that the strange things became impossible to ignore.

It began ordinarily enough.

"She's a remarkable child," her teachers would gush, after Hermione mastered reading and writing quicker than any child they'd ever taught before.

"Shockingly resilient, for such a slip of a girl," the next-door neighbour remarked when she saw Hermione fall, then get up without so much as a scraped knee.

"She's just faster than she looks," one parent said, after their child swore blind that Hermione had teleported from one end of the playground to the other during a race.

But, soon enough, these instances became more and more regular, and stranger every time. Hermione herself appeared to brush off every apparently unexplainable event, looking somewhat surprised for all of two seconds before rushing off again. Sometimes, the neighbours, or a teacher, or a friend would bring something to her parents' attention - for example, when she fell out of a tree only to float to the ground and land unharmed in the grass. Yet, each time Madelaine and Robert asked her about it, Hermione would just shrug.

"I didn't _fall," _she scoffed, all of seven at the time. "I _flew._"

Things came to a head not long after Hermione turned eleven, just before the end of Year Six. As the other children told it, one of the boys had started a game of Kiss Chase, only Hermione was '_boring' _and didn't want to join in. Only, said boy refused to take no for an answer, so pursued Hermione and tried to kiss her. A second later, he was screaming blue murder, and insisting that she had clawed his face like a cat.

Hermione burst into tears when confronted about the incident, afraid that she might be expelled. She promised that she'd never even touched the boy and, given the fact that there were no marks on his face, the teachers were inclined to believe her.

Even so, the incident gave the people of their little village yet more reason to suspect Hermione. The girl never did anything wrong - indeed, she seemed frightened of the very prospect - but none of them could shake the feeling that there was something incredibly peculiar about her.

And when, a few months later, the neighbours saw the family lugging huge, old-fashioned trunks into their tiny car, followed by Hermione dressed up in what appeared to be robes and a witch's hat, they shook their heads and pursed their lips.

Yes, there really was something very odd indeed about little Hermione Granger.


End file.
